Even the name hints at the Bristol-based Douglas firm that was among Britain’s leading early marques, winning its first Isle of Man TT in 1912, and establishing a reputation for flat-twin roadsters that lasted until production ended in the Fifties.

But the Black Douglas is very different. It’s a new bike: designed in Birmingham, produced near Milan, and powered by a 230cc, single-cylinder engine from China. Far from being a fragile piece of history best appreciated by elderly enthusiasts, the Sterling is a modern motorcycle that combines its old-school look with simplicity of use.

"... a very modern heart."... Some ebikers might say it has a Black Heart (burning "petrol"), then proceed to stuff that tank with lithium cells. (And grumble how it's hard to pedal...)

Every year, Americans mark Presidents Day with an orgy of auto sales, kicking-off the car-buying season. Our celebration of George Washington’s birthday is now firmly intertwined with the automobile, a testament to the powerful grip of car culture upon our civic imagination. But more than a century ago, February 22 bore a very different identity: It was Bicycle Day.

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In some ways, the commercialization of the holiday parallels the conversion of America into a consumers’ republic. Americans gave expression to their freedom by purchasing what they wanted, and above all, by buying devices that promised personal liberty. Bicycles once promised to usher in an age of personal rapid transit, freeing Americans to go wherever they chose. In the twentieth century, cars did the same. And now, in the twenty-first, ebike sales are back.

In the second ever issue of Autocar, published 6 November 1895, we published a report from the Cyclist magazine on an electric car that had been built in the summer of 1894.

Produced by the Garrard & Blumfield bicycle engineering company of Coventry, it was a four-seat phaeton with an innovative drive system.

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The electric power unit for the Garrard & Blumfield was “contained in a series of twenty-four accumulator (rechargeable) cells”. These were likely lead acid, although we could not find any writing confirming this.

“The accumulators (batteries) weigh some 500lbs,” we continued, “and the completed vehicle comes out at about 1000lbs, or, roughly speaking, about half a ton, as against two and a half tons the weight of the lightest electric road carriage hitherto placed upon the road.”

The phaeton’s “cells were connected with a motor carried upon the (car’s) framework beneath; the spindle which the motor works, being arranged with a feather, so that it can be slid to and fro several inches by means of a lever, placed in contiguity to the rider’s left hand.”

“This is effected by quite a new system,” we said, with “the spindle carrying a roller or a pair of rollers so arranged that they jamb between the surfaces of two metal discs which face each other in the rear portion of the carriage.

“By sliding the roller in or out from the centre of these discs, the power applicable, and inversely the speed attained, is graduated to the nicest degree. The discs are then connected by toothed gearing and a chain with the balance gear which drives the two back wheels.”

This method, instead of finding a way to modulate the available power, “saved a tremendous waste of electricity”.

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What a shame that electric vehicles never truly took off, and are only returning to the forefront of the industry now, 110 years later. If they had co-existed with ICE cars, who knows what the common electric car would be like today, and for how long ICEs would have been dead and buried.

In the 1930s, Britain’s Ministry of Transport built an extensive network of bike highways around the country—at least 280 miles of paved, protected infrastructure dedicated to cyclists alone. For decades, it was entirely forgotten—overgrown and overlooked—so much so that no one seems to remember that these lanes had existed at all.

CityLab (formerly The Atlantic Cities) is the latest expansion of The Atlantic's digital properties, launched in September 2011. The stand-alone site has been described as exploring and explaining "the most innovative ideas and pressing issues facing today's global cities and neighborhoods."

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The Atlantic is an American magazine and multi-platform publisher, founded in 1857 as The Atlantic Monthly in Boston, Massachusetts. Since 2006, The Atlantic has been based in Washington, D.C. Created as a literary and cultural commentary magazine, it has grown to achieve a reputation for having a moderate mindset in its reporting. The magazine has notably recognized and published new writers and poets, as well as encouraged major careers. It has published leading writers' commentary on abolition, education, and other major issues in contemporary political affairs. The periodical was named Magazine of the Year by the American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) in 2016.

The doctor was appalled. Two young women “of irreproachable character and social standing” had befriended two “well-dressed damsels” while out riding bikes. The four friends met up for rides for a few weeks, until it was discovered that the well-dressed damsels “were none other than a pair of nymphs de pave”—streetwalkers.

The clear lesson, according to this Louisville physician, writing in an 1897 medical journal: Women should never ride bikes.

FUN article. Might remind some about the early daze of electric traction on bikes.

Boulder County History: Trolley brought visitors to Chautauqua
("Street railway was boon to University Hill development"):http://www.dailycamera.com/news/ci_3100 ... chautauqua
(Pic caption: "The first passengers rode on the new Boulder Street Railway electric trolley cars on June 24, 1899. (Carnegie Branch Library for Local History")

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What if you could hop on an open-air trolley, bring your bicycle aboard, and enjoy a ride uphill to Chautauqua Park? That's what they did in 1899.

With the public debate on parking at Chautauqua Park in full swing, perhaps bringing back an old-fashioned trolley should be considered.

When Texas educators agreed to establish their new Chautauqua in Boulder in 1898, they wanted guaranteed transportation from the train depot. But that vision didn't come to fruition right away.

Visitors to the new Chautauqua got off the train at the depot at 14th and Water (now Canyon) streets and trudged up the hill to the Chautauqua grounds. Women, in the long dark skirts, high-necked blouses and heavy hats of the Victorian era, were overheated and exhausted by walking over a mile in the summer heat. Travelers could hire a horse and carriage, for an extra expense, and many did. Locals drove their own horse-drawn vehicles to the park as well, resulting in the green space filled up as a buggy parking lot.

The first internal combustion-propelled car may have chugged out of Karl Benz's workshop back in 1886, but it took until 1901 for a US state to decide that the automobile could be dangerous if driven at speed.

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And it was in the UK, in Kent in 1896, that a certain Walter Arnold driving a Benz Motor Carriage became the first ever recipient of a speeding fine. Arnold was caught doing 8mph — four times the speed limit — and the car was apprehended by a policeman on a bicycle.

Rather, as Bryan wrote, the downfall of the Edison-Ford electric car came about because Ford demanded the use of Edison's nickel-iron batteries in the car, and would have no other battery powering this car. Edison's batteries, however, were found to have very high internal resistance and were thus incapable of powering an electric car under many circumstances. Heavier lead-acid batteries (which would have made the car too ponderous) were substituted behind Henry Ford's back, and when he found out, he went ballistic. The program quickly fell to the wayside with other projects demanding Henry Ford's time. According to The Ford Century, Ford invested $1.5 million in the electric-car project and nearly bought 100,000 batteries from Edison before the project fell apart.

EurekAlert! is an online, global news service operated by AAAS, the science society. EurekAlert! provides a central place through which universities, medical centers, journals, government agencies, corporations and other organizations engaged in research can bring their news to the media. EurekAlert! also offers its news and resources to the public. EurekAlert! features news and resources focused on all areas of science, medicine and technology.

In honor of the inventor, their prototype is still made completely of wood, but it also contains an electric motor, battery, sensors and mini-computer. As soon as the rider pushes off from the ground, the motor starts and provides additional power during the entire ride. With their "Draisine 200.0" the computer scientists are testing the validity of mathematical proofs, among other things to improve the safety of e-bike software.

Holger Hermanns is a professor of computer science at Saarland University and has also become well-known in the bicycling scene. With his basic research, he wants to help the fast-growing e-bike industry avoid programming errors that have already become the subject of headlines in other industries. Hermanns is convinced that "if we succeed in making automatic software verification an industry standard, we will no longer have to go through things like the diesel scandal."

Though this was the first time riot police took to two wheels, bike-based policing has a long history in the US. What Dyment calls the “golden age” came early in the 20th century. Bikes were introduced in the late 1880s to police departments looking for more mobile patrolmen, and to New York City in 1895 under then Police Commissioner Teddy Roosevelt, an avid cyclist. By 1907, a bicycle trade magazine estimated 50,000 bicycle police across the country, with 1,200 in New York City alone.

There is certainly a Robocop feel to the outfits Seattle’s bike squad wear: despite the polo shirts and (optional) shorts, the officers wear Bell Super 3R helmets and body armour. Nor are the bikes themselves your casual BMX. They have a custom-built hardtail mountain bike frame from Volcanic, a company in Bellingham, Washington that specialises in catering to law enforcement.

For more than 45 years, Connecticut Magazine has coupled award-winning journalism with a monthly slice of Connecticut living in a magazine that reaches more than 380,000 adult print and online readers each month statewide.

In the 1870s he recognized the potential of the bicycle, and by the 1890s was manufacturing about 250,000 a year at his Hartford factory. As the 19th century drew to a close, he knew that the golden age of the bicycle was ending and the future was with the engine and automobile. He favored electricity to power his cars, as it was clean, quiet and easy to access. Though he successfully produced the first commercial electric car, the concept of an electric vehicle was at least a century ahead of its time and ultimately proved to be Pope’s undoing.

Earlier this year, India dethroned China from a long reign as the world's largest motorcycle manufacturer, having already overtaken China to become the largest domestic motorcycle market three years ago.

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China's domestic motorcycle market has been in decline for five years as government policy has incentivized electric bicycle sales and denied motorcycles access to city centers across China. Conversely, the relentless growth of motorcycle sales in India has now created such momentum that it is beginning to reshape the global marketplace.

Some already ebike-addicted might see these India volumes of sales as priming a market for sales of urban bettery-electrics in the future .

Buffalo Rising is an online magazine founded by Newell Nussbaumer in 2003 as a way to cover grassroots movements, Urban planning and development, and activism in Buffalo, New York. The format was originally a tri-annual and later a monthly printed paper with a small online blog to supplement it. The online blog quickly gained popularity, and in 2004 Buffalo Rising Online was launched.

On Saturday, September 23, from 9am to 10:30am, a reception/ribbon cutting will be held at the downtown Buffalo museum, where Jim and Mary Ann Sandoro (museum owners/operators) will unveil the procured pieces from the collection, ranging from the 1860s to the 1920s. The acquisition of the bicycles and memorabilia was made possible with the help of the Wendt and Oishei Foundations.

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Six years after trying to stave off a range of interested collectors from around the world from poaching the collection (many of the bikes were manufactured right here in Buffalo), Copake Auction Inc. held the first of three auctions on December 1, 2012. At the time, there were 534 registered bidders from the states as well as Canada, Russia, Mexico, Spain, UK, Italy, Czech Rep., Cyprus, Australia and The Netherlands, according to Copake Auction.

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Other bicycles of interest included a 1960 Bowden “Spacelander” $13,800...

To celebrate Suffrage Day 2017, Councillor Cathy Casey looks at the way the humble bicycle empowered women in New Zealand and assisted in the achievement of women’s suffrage.

Every year on Suffrage Day, Aucklanders gather to celebrate the occasion at the Auckland Women’s Suffrage Centenary Memorial in Te Ha o Hine Place.

The memorial, designed by artist Claudia Pond-Eyley and ceramicist Jan Morrison, was commissioned for the Suffrage Centennial Year in 1993, and is made with more than 2000 coloured tiles.

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Today, when I park my electric bike next to the memorial’s four women cyclists, I acknowledge the bicycle’s contribution to women’s emancipation. In the words of the nineteenth century American women’s rights activist Susan B. Anthony: “Bicycling has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world…I stand and rejoice every time I see a woman ride by on a wheel …the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”